Josh Bazell has a BA in writing from Brown University and a MD from Columbia University. He is currently a medical resident at the University of California, San Francisco, and is working on his second novel. He wrote "Beat the Reaper" during the end of medical school and the beginning of residency. Some of his favorite writers are James Ellroy, Ken Bruen, Michael Connelly and Peter Lovesey. He states that he got the idea for this novel when going through medical school training and observed the tension physicians feel between doing medicine and their life outside of medicine. So he wanted to write about a doctor who was also the opposite of a doctor.

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January 2009,
Josh Bazell
"I wanted to explore the extent to which people can change themselves. So I needed extremes, and since I wanted the character to end up as a doctor, it seemed reasonable to have him start out as a killer."
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“In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.”
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Josh Bazell,
Wild Thing